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What’s the best lossless image format?

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Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#101

Post by mgraczyk »

lajamerr wrote: post #22

JPEG XL is the standard to beat them all. Like how Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web. JPEG XL covers nearly every use case for images, even replacing GIFs with it's animation support. Existing JPEGs can also be re-encoded losslessly into JPEG XL format/data structure and get significant file size savings. This backwards compatiability is very important in transitioning to web to JPEG…

I used to think this, but I've lost confidence over the last year. I literally work on the software that generates jpg files on Googles Pixel phones, and there seems to be no realistic path to JPEG XL adoption within the next 5 years.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#102

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #88
Beltalowda wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats. I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's…

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

I don't think you're right about H264 for video. Video is big enough that there is real money to be made in better formats.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#103

Post by thayne »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #88
Beltalowda wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats. I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's…

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

> DVORAK is better than QWERTY

Not if you're a programmer, punctuation, which is much more frequent in programming languages than english, is a lot harder to type.

I've heard colemak is better for developers, but as a vim user, relearning touch typing AND my vim muscle memory doesn't appeal to me, so i haven't given it a serious try.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#104

Post by thayne »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #100
GetJiggyWithout wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard supported by a whopping 9 (!) apps! Sorry, but prevalence of support matters too, and PNG can't be beat there.

This is very misleading. Some of those 9 "apps" include imagemagick, ffmpeg, exiftool, libvips, and Qt KImageFormats. These libraries power a vast amount of software. Support is also in beta for Firefox and Chrome.

So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will work. On windows and mac, it's probably less likely.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#105

Post by DeadAndHorny »

Beltalowda wrote: post #56
lajamerr wrote: post #22

JPEG XL is the standard to beat them all. Like how Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web. JPEG XL covers nearly every use case for images, even replacing GIFs with it's animation support. Existing JPEGs can also be re-encoded losslessly into JPEG XL format/data structure and get significant file size savings. This backwards compatiability is very important in transitioning to web to JPEG…

> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats. I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's…

Can you share any links here of your tool?

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#107

Post by CyanBird »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #88
Beltalowda wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats. I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's…

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

> because it fits what the world was already designed around

There is this quote from Edward Bernays that I like

> “The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia.”- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#108

Post by lifthrasiir »

travisgriggs wrote: post #106

I was kinda sad QOI ( https://github.com/phoboslab/qoi ) wasn’t included in the comparisons.

QOI is kinda overrated, especially given the existence of fpng(e) and fjxl which operate within the limitation of existing formats and generally outperform QOI. QOI is a great demonstration that better prediction can make up for less efficient coding, but not much beyond that.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#109

Post by guitarbill »

Melatonic wrote: post #74
lajamerr wrote: post #22

JPEG XL is the standard to beat them all. Like how Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web. JPEG XL covers nearly every use case for images, even replacing GIFs with it's animation support. Existing JPEGs can also be re-encoded losslessly into JPEG XL format/data structure and get significant file size savings. This backwards compatiability is very important in transitioning to web to JPEG…

Unless nobody adopts it? EXR seems like it does all of the high end pro features of JpegXL and more (including 32 bit color). JPEGXL can do some odd stuff like animated gif type images but that seems more like a web end user feature than something professionals would care about. I can see it replacing Jpeg / GIF but I don't see this becoming an industry standard anytime soon.

I kind of hope that happens. First of all, still charging for the spec is ridiculous. So most people really have no idea how (over)complicated or long it is, except by trawling through a C++ reference implementation. E.g. AVIF does this much, much better. Do we really need to support images with 4096 channels in a web browser? And the name is going to be super confusing; it's too close to JPEG.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#110

Post by chrismorgan »

cpncrunch wrote: post #90
emeril wrote: post #17

For web graphics, isn't a mix of PNG/JPEG good enough generally speaking? I'd imagine the benefits of changing to something more modern/efficient aren't worth the cost/time involved other than in esoteric situations given that most end users have high bandwidth connections and bandwidth costs typically aren't too significant?

You might want to check your pagespeed insights to verify that. I noticed that our pagespeed score was very poor (due to google using new methods to calculate those scores). Adding webp versions of images reduced the size of those images significantly, and brought our pagespeed scores back to more reasonable values in google's eyes.

It’s unlikely that WebP was what helped there, but rather more lossy encoding (presuming it was JPEGs you were replacing). Yes, WebP is smaller for a given perception quality level, but it’s typically not that much smaller; you could have achieved results almost as good by reencoding to the same perception quality as you used on the WebPs but still as JPEGs.
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